I really hope astral can monetize without a highly destructive rugpull, because they are building great tools and solving real problems.
I really hope astral can monetize without a highly destructive rugpull, because they are building great tools and solving real problems.
"pyx" is their first commercial offering: https://astral.sh/pyx
I agree though. Hope this is successful and they keep building awesome open-source tools.
We're paying for pyx. Wouldn't have if we didn't enjoy enjoy uv and ruff.
It's definitely a narrow path for them to tread. Feels like the best case is something like Hashicorp, great until the founders don't want to do it anymore.
> Feels like the best case is something like Hashicorp
Wow, that's probably my go-to case of things going south, not "best case scenario". They sold to IBM, a famous graveyard for software, and on the way there changed from FOSS licensing to their own proprietary ones for software the community started to rely on.
You're not wrong, but a) most of the badness happened after the founders checked out and b) it's hard to find examples of developer tool companies doing better.
You however, are. Hashimoto didn't leave until December 2023, Hashicorp announced the license change August 10, 2023. Also way back in September 2021 they started having staffing issues and stopped accepting community contributions, and also made the questionable choice of going public that same year.
You might be on to something with point B, hard to find good examples of developer tool companies that don't eventually turn sour. However, there are countless examples of successful and still very useful developer tools out there, maybe slapping a company on it and sell a "pro" version isn't the way to go?
I actually would argue that Hashimoto "left" earlier. He "stepped down" from the executive team July 2021 and became an individual contributor then. He likely lost interest/power a long time before 2023.
https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/mitchell-s-new-role-at-has...
Meh. The end of the company many of us admire was a combination of the founders giving up control to the usual villains and the venture business model failing for developer tools. I don't think the specific departure date matters very much; things started to degrade earlier.
As for "slapping a company on it", I agree, but also I don't think we've developed a viable alternative. Python has been limping along with one toolchain or another for my entire career (multiple decades) and it took Astral's very specific approach to create something better. It's fair to ask why they needed to be venture backed, but they clearly are and the lack of successful alternatives is telling.
Why the “y” look so wrong in the special font.
Yeah their work thus far has been an incredible public service to the Python community.
Feels like they’re headed in the direction of bun.
In zero revenue or acquisition direction
Thankfully all these LLM labs are heavily invested in python so this seems like the likely route IMO
Just need to book a long nice walk with one of the CEOs
My issue with them is that they claim their tools replace existing tools, but they don't bother to actually replicate all of the functionality. So if you want to use the full functionality of existing tools, you need to fall back on them instead of using Astral's "replacements". It's like one step forward and one step back. For me personally, speed of the tooling is not as important as what the tooling can check, which is very important for a language like Python that is very easy to get wrong.
If there are specific incompatibilities or rough edges you're running into, we're always interested in hearing about them. We try pretty hard to provide a pip compatibility layer[1], but Python packaging is non-trivial and has a lot of layers and caveats.
[1]: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/pip/
Is there any plan for a non-“compatibility layer” way to do anything manual or nontrivial? uv sync and uv run are sort of fine for developing a distribution/package, but they’re not exactly replacements for anything else one might want to do with the pip and venv commands.
As a very basic example I ran into last week, Python tooling, even the nice Astral tooling, seems to be almost completely lacking any good detection of what source changes need to trigger what rebuild steps. Unless I’ve missed something, if I make a change to a source tree that uv sync doesn’t notice, I’m stuck with uv pip install -e ., which is a wee bit disappointing and feels a bit gross. I suppose I could try to put something correct into cache-keys, but this is fundamentally wrong. The list of files in my source tree that need to trigger a refresh is something that my build system determines when it builds. Maybe there should be a way to either plumb that into uv’s cache or to tell uv that at least “uv sync” should run the designated command to (incrementally) rebuild my source tree?
(Not that I can blame uv for failing to magically exfiltrate metadata from the black box that is hatchling plus its plugins.)
> Is there any plan for a non-“compatibility layer” way to do anything manual or nontrivial?
It's really helpful to have examples for this, like the one you provide below (which I'll respond to!). I've been a maintainer and contributor to the PyPA standard tooling for years, and once uv "clicked" for me I didn't find myself having to leave the imperative layer (of uv add/sync/etc) at all.
> As a very basic example I ran into last week, Python tooling, even the nice Astral tooling, seems to be almost completely lacking any good detection of what source changes need to trigger what rebuild steps.
Could you say more about your setup here? By "rebuild steps" I'm inferring you mean an editable install (versus a sdist/bdist build) -- in general `uv sync` should work in that scenario, including for non-trivial things where e.g. an extension build has to be re-run. In other words, if you do `uv sync` instead of `uv pip install -e .`, that should generally work.
However, to take a step back from that: IMO the nicer way to use uv is to not run `uv sync` that much. Instead, you can generally use `uv run ...` to auto-sync and run your development tooling within an environment than includes your editable installation.
By way of example, here's what I would traditionally do:
Whereas with uv: That single command does everything pip and venv would normally do to prep an editable environment and run pytest. It also works across re-runs, since it'll run `uv sync` as needed under the hood.My setup is a mixed C/C++/Python project. The C and C++ code builds independently of the Python code (using waf, but I think this barely matters -- the point is that the C/C++ build is triggered by a straightforward command and that it rebuilds correctly based on changed source code). The Python code depends on the C/C++ code via ctypes and cffi (which load a .so file produced by the C/C++ build), and there are no extension modules.
Python builds via [tool.hatch.build.targets.wheel.hooks.custom] in pyproject.toml and a hatch_build.py that invokes waf and force-includes the .so files into useful locations.
Use case 1: Development. I change something (C/C++ source, the waf configuration, etc) and then try to run Python code (via uv sync, uv run, or activating a venv with an editable install). Since there doesn't seem to be a way to have the build feed dependencies out to uv (this seems to be a deficiency in PEP 517/660), I either need to somehow statically generate cache-keys or resort to reinstall-package to get uv commands to notice when something changed. I can force the issue with uv pip install -e ., although apparently I can also force the issue with uv run/sync --reinstall-packages [distro name]. [0] So I guess uv pip is not actually needed here.
It would be very nice if there was an extension to PEP 660 that would allow the editable build to tell the front-end what its computed dependencies are.
Use case 2: Production
IMO uv sync and uv run have no place in production. I do not want my server to resolve dependencies or create environments at all, let alone by magic, when I am running a release of my software built for the purpose.
My code has, long before pyproject.toml or uv was a thing and even before virtual environments existed (!), had a script to build a production artifact. The resulting artifact makes its way to a server, and the code in it gets run. If I want to use dependencies as found by uv, or if I want to use entrypoints (a massive improvement over rolling my own way to actually invoke a Python program!), as far as I can tell I can either manually make and populate a venv using uv venv and uv pip or I can use UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT with uv sync and abuse uv sync to imperatively create a venv.
Maybe some day uv will come up with a better way to produce production artifacts. (And maybe in the distant future, the libc world will come up with a decent way to make C/C++ virtual environments that don't rely on mount namespaces or chroot.)
[0] As far as I can tell, the accepted terminology is that the thing produced by a pyproject.toml is possibly a "project" or a "distribution" and that these are both very much distinct from a "package". I think it's a bit regrettable that uv's option here is spelled like it rebuilds a _package_ when the thing you feed it is not the name of a package and it does not rebuild a particular package. In uv's defense, PEP 517 itself seems rather confused as well.
uv needs to support creation of zipapps, like pdm does (what pex does standalone).
Various tickets asking for it, but they also want to bundle in the python interpreter itself, which is out of scope for a pyproject.toml manager: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/5802
Their integration with existing tools seems to be generally pretty good.
For example, uv-build is rather lacking in any sort of features (and its documentation barely exists AFAICT, which is a bit disappointing), but uv works just fine with hatchling, using configuration mechanisms that predate uv.
(I spent some time last week porting a project from an old, entirely unsupportable build system to uv + hatchling, and I came out of it every bit as unimpressed by the general state of Python packaging as ever, but I had no real complaints about uv. It would be nice if there was a build system that could go even slightly off the beaten path without writing custom hooks and mostly inferring how they’re supposed to work, though. I’m pretty sure that even the major LLMs only know how to write a Python package configuration because they’ve trained on random blog posts and some GitHub packages that mostly work — they’re certainly not figuring anything out directly from the documentation, nor could they.)
Getting from 95% compatible to 100% compatible may not only take a lot of time, but also result in worsening the performance. Sometimes it's good to drop some off the less frequently used features in order to make the tool better (or allow for making the tool better)
Damn it, this unicorn farting rainbows and craping gold is not yet capable of towing another car. I don't know why they advertise it as a replacement for my current mode of transportation.
Got any examples in mind?